BY AVERY GOODSTINE for WEEKLY VOLCANO | 10/30/2026
What do a hotel, malted milk shop, hat store, jewelry shop, shoe store, flower shop, and coffee shop all have in common? They all occupied the bottom floor of Tacoma’s famous flatiron-shaped Bostwick building. Oh, add ghost cemetery to that list too.
The iconic triangular building was first erected in 1889 and housed the Western Trust Company of Tacoma on the ground retail space while three floors of hotel rooms were built above it.
The retail space came to be known as the Bostwick Block and was added to the Tacoma Register of Historical Places in 1999.
The building is named after Dr. Henry Clay Bostwick, who was one of the first official practicing doctors in the city. He had his own residence on the site of the current building before the hotel rooms were added.
Chris Staudinger of Pretty Gritty Tours described the building as an “anchor for the community” as it points toward the Pantages Theater in the city’s theater district and is planted at the triple intersection of St. Helens Avenue, South 9th Street, and Broadway.
It’s also located right across from the Hotel Winthrop and down the street from the Hosmer House, two more buildings that have solidified their place as part of Tacoma’s history.
“It is kind of the, like, central spot there, but it’s had a long and storied history,” Staudinger said.
Perhaps the most well-known piece of the Bostwick building’s history is that it was a filming location for the 1990 movie “I Love You to Death,” featuring an all-star cast of Kevin Kline, William Hurt, Tracey Ullman, River Phoenix, Keanu Reeves, and James Gammon.
The movie revolves around a murder plot involving Joey (Kevin Kline) and his wife, Rosalie (Tracey Ullman), who run a pizza shop. And guess where those pizza shop spots are filmed? You got it, on the bottom floor retail space of the Bostwick building.
For the last few decades, the ground floor has seen a collection of coffee shops come and go. There was Grounds for Coffee from 1993 to 2000, then Tully’s until 2018, after which it became Cafe Bostwick, which is still there today, although it’s seen a number of owners.
Perhaps the reason for so many business changes is because the building could be home to several ghosts.
The current owner is Cecile Lahti, who took over the cafe in March 2025 and is very open about her own off-putting experiences there.
“I don’t even believe in that,” she said before describing the most recent occurrence of her ice machine suddenly breaking down and then restarting by itself.
“My ice machine went completely blank one time,” Lahti said. “I was like, that’s it, I quit. Like, I was done. I was like, I’m not doing this anymore. My fridges would break one by one over and over, and newer fridges too, not just the old ones. And then my ice machine broke one day, and I was like, I quit. And it should have never turned back on, but it did.”
She said she thinks the ice machine was fixed by a female entity who didn’t want her to leave. Lahti said: “She’s probably like, ‘she’s the only one who puts up with this.’”
When she first bought the shop, Lahti said she saw a padlock on the back door violently spinning in a way that couldn’t be explained due to wind or air pressure.
She said she’s not sure why she’s given the ghost female pronouns, but nothing else seems to fit quite right.
Staudinger said there have been a variety of deaths in the building in its earlier years because there were many hotel guests who stayed long term and treated the rooms like apartments. He knows of at least two deaths: Anders Sörensen and James Joyce. Both died of natural causes in their hotel rooms. Sörensen was the Bostwick Hotel manager and died on March 3, 1913, inside his room after a period of illness.
“In those rooms and throughout the building, I think people have talked about smelling cigarette smoke just all of a sudden … or that they’ll see things get moved around inside the space down there as well,” Staudinger said.
He added that people who live in the apartments today have mentioned a feeling that someone else is in the room with them at night.
Lahti said many of her employees at the cafe have had their own unexplainable experiences, such as lights flickering and a general feeling of someone else being there with them. She added that she didn’t hear about the building’s alleged haunting before she bought the business, but nothing has ever felt truly scary.
“It’s just kind of like weird things,” she said. “There’s a part at the back that when I show people back there, they never look. They’ll just never look to the left until I point out that they didn’t, and then they’ll look and they’re like, ‘No, that’s creepy over there.’”
The Bostwick building is one of the stops on a Pretty Gritty Tours Tacoma ghost tour, and Staudinger said the building’s eerie vibe is still often talked about today.
While it doesn’t seem to have any wild death stories to specifically explain the alleged haunting, Staudinger said in his mind, the building’s history lends itself perfectly for ghost stories.
“I feel like with most of the deaths at the Bostwick, it always seems like it was just this forgotten group of people that had reached, sort of, a lonely end and then passed anonymously in a long-term hotel room,” he said. “It seems like the most accurate recipe for a ghost because it’s just this collection of people that ended unceremoniously, alone, and I would imagine them wandering around afterwards.”
